Katsudo Shashin (Moving Pictures)
The apparatus was something you bought abroad. In November 1896, a Kinetoscope screening opened in Kobe. On February 15, 1897, Katsutaro Inabata held a paid Cinématographe screening at the Minamichi Enbujo theater in Osaka. In March, the Vitascope screened at the Kanda Kinkikan in Tokyo. What's interesting is that this "first" never settles into one answer. Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto each have a monument reading "the birthplace of Japanese cinema" — and depending on how you set the criteria, each one is correct. This map has said, in band after band, that origins are disputed; here, those disputes are literally carved in stone around town. (Incidentally, the commemorative "Cinema Day," December 1, is said to be November 25 rounded up to a cleaner date.) To the imported device, Japan added something of its own: the benshi. A performer stood beside the silent film, narrating the story, voicing the characters, controlling the pacing. Japan is one of the very few places where this kind of narration grew into an art form of its own — along with the Korean peninsula, then under Japanese rule, and Thailand, where Japanese exhibitors are said to have first introduced the practice. In other words, it was almost entirely a Japanese phenomenon. It had plenty of precedent. In Ningyo Joruri puppet theater, the narrator and the puppeteer were separate people. Kabuki had its own tradition of narration from the side of the stage. Utsushi-e magic-lantern shows and peep-box entertainments had their own spoken introductions. Long before film arrived, this country already had a performance tradition where the image and the voice belonged to different people. Popular benshi are said to have been more famous than actors, and paid considerably better (I could not verify a specific figure). Those same benshi later lost their jobs to a film that could finally speak for itself. On April 18, 1932, workers at a Shochiku-affiliated theater in Asakusa went on strike, protesting layoffs tied to the shift to talkies. That year, there were 111 labor disputes at movie theaters nationwide. In the middle of the Showa Depression, management pushed the layoffs through, and labor lost. One more thing belongs in this band: an earthquake. The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, destroyed Shochiku's Kamata studio, and within nine days the decision was made to move to Shimogamo in Kyoto. Nikkatsu moved its contemporary-drama division to Kyoto as well. The long-standing division in Japanese film — period dramas made in Kyoto, contemporary dramas made in Tokyo — wasn't designed by anyone. It settled into place naturally, after the ground shook.